American English using the International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was created by the International Phonetic Association in the 1880s to transcribe the sounds of all spoken languages.

The IPA is encoded in Unicode but many additional notational systems are in use that allow the IPA to be represented using only the (ASCII) characters on the keyboard. Many of these "plain text" notations are shown below for American English: